112 I T is sometimes urged upon Ameri- can authors that they should write more politically, out of a clearer commitment or engagement or sense of protest. Two foreign novels, one by a Chilean and the other by a Nigerian, demonstrate that having a political subject does not automatically give a novel grandeur, urgency, or coherence. "Curfew," by the Chilean J osé Donoso (translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; $18.95), takes place in 1985, in a crowded time span of less than twenty- four hours bridging the wake and the funeral of Pablo Neruda's widow, Ma- tilde. The occasion collects a number of varied friends and admirers-Ma- ñungo Vera, a folksinger returned from twelve years in Europe; Judit Torre, a blond, aristocratic revolutionary who looks like the young Virginia Woolf; Fausta Manquileo, a matronly literary figure of distinction; Don Celedonio Villanueva, her husband and a literary figure of perceptibly less distinction; Juan López, called Lopito, a former poet and present drunkard and abra- sively obnoxious hanger-on; Lisboa, a Communist Party zealot; Ada Luz, his girlfriend and a docile handmaiden of the late Matilde Neruda; and Federi- co Fox, a corpulent cousin of Judit Torre's and the only significant char- acter who actively works with the rul- ing Pinochet regime instead of hating and resisting it. Pinochet (who is never mentioned in the novel's text) came to power in 1973, in a bloody coup that ousted and killed President Salvador Allende, so by 1985 the dissidents have had time to go into exile and return, to be impris- oned and released, to grow middle- aged in their youtÌlful fury and frustra- tion, to lose faith and make ironical accommodations and die of natural causes. Lopito says, "All of us have re- tired from the poli tical scene, even though we keep telling ourselves that the people united will never be defeated when for more than ten years they've had us more defeated than I can imag- ine, Mañungo. This is total defeat. . . . A bomb here, another there, but they don't do anything, like swearing by nonviolent protest or violent protest, or the opposition, or the people united, BOOKS In Dispraise of the Powers That Be et cetera. They broke our backs, Mañungo." Pablo Neruda, the triumphant em- bodiment of Chilean culture and left- wing conscience, "returned to Chile to die of sadness." Now his widow, Ma- tilde, whom he had nicknamed "La Chascona, the wild woman. . . because of her tangled mop of hair" - Matilde, who had been "a young, desirable woman of the people, as juicy as a ripe apricot," who "took long, wine-soaked siestas with the poet" - has died in a Houston hospital, after receiving last rites and confiding to Ada Luz that she wants a Mass said at her funeral. The suppression of this request-by Lisboa, because the presence of a revolutionary priest at the graveside would detract from Communist domination of the ceremony-is the main political thread wound around the funeral. The main cultural thread is Federico Fox's ac- quisition of control over N eruda's val- uable papers and letters, in exchange for his removal of bureaucratic road- blocks in the way of establishing a Pablo N eruda Foundation. The main romantic thread is the coming together again of Judit Torre and Mañungo Vera, who had first romanced in their student days. The principal moral event, I suppose, is Mañungo's decision to stay in Chile, with his seven-year- old French-speaking son, after his round-the-clock experience of life under the regime. In his youth, Mañungo was a rock star, a "guerrilla singer . . . possessed by the potency of his guitar-phallus-machine gun;" his career, pursued since the coup in America and Europe, has been lately bothered by a "softening of his poli- tics" and a chronic tinnitus in his left ear, a subjective sensation of noise that he identifies as "the voice of the old woman"-a certain wheezing sound made by the sea on the coast of Chiloé, his native island-calling him home. Among these many-too many- threads, the most interesting psycho- logical one traces Judit Torre's pecu- liar form of political and erotic dead- ness, induced by a traumatic episode when she was being held for question- ing with some other members of her shadowy little group of anti-regime women. Tied and hooded and naked, she hears in her cell the other women being tortured and raped; but her tor- turer merely tells her in his nasal voice, while he puts his warm moist hand on her knee, to shout as if she were being raped. She remembers: I waited for his hand to touch me again, my skin waited to be caressed by that viscous, tepid hand that never went fur- ther although the nasal voice whispered, Shout more, as if you were enjoying your- self, as if you wanted more, as if I were hurting you but you wanted more, and I shout my lungs out howling like a bitch because I'm reaching a shameful pleasure I'd never felt before, not even with Ramón [her lover, a slain resistance leader]. Shout, shout, he repeated, and I call for help because his whisper threatens me if I don't shout, and I shout with terror at myself, because in this totally un erotic situation I shout my shame at my pleasure while in the other cells my friends are howling like me, but because of tortures different from the torture of being exempted from tor- ture. . . . I didn't shout because of the trag- edy of the other women, I didn't take part in the feast of that majestic collective form, from which the soft hand excluded me in order to satisfy God knows what fantasies, this impotent monster who de- manded I shout with greater and greater conviction without knowing that my shouts of terror and pleasure were real. This moment of feigned torture evi- dently constitutes J udit's supreme or- gasm and forms the novel's most inti- mate and meaningful vision of the rela- tion between the regime and its ene- mies. It also warrants revenge. J udit is given a pistol by her women's group and goes forth in the night to find and slay the impotent torturer whose "com- plex humanity" robbed her of solidarity and unqualified revolutionary pur- pose: "Sensitive, the bastard with the nasal voice. His sensitivity tore away my right to hatred and revenge." This loss is cause, in the murky atmosphere of contemporary Chile, for murder. "Curfew" packs a baggage of Dos- toyevskian ambition which its action and conversations do not quite carry.